Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies

If you’ve bailed on Bitcoin because the Mt. Gox vaults are empty, you might want to try these other cryptocurrencies.

The vaults of Mt. Gox are empty and there is dissension among its coinholders. As the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange files for bankruptcy in Japan, there are still those who believe in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Part of their appeal lays in just what makes them risky. Cryptocurrencies are unregulated and instead of working for money, as is the case in a capitalist system, currency is generated and exchanged via cryptography. The currency is also untraceable, which made it great for illegal exchanges on the Silk Road, but also means that the $400 million or so that disappeared from Mt. Gox might never be recovered.

Mt. Gox is an object lesson in that while it can take a long time to mine a unit of a cryptocurrency, it doesn’t take long at all for an entire exchange to disappear. If you had MMM Coin, you probably don’t have enough of them to rub together to get so much as a cup of coffee. Some cryptocurrencies seemed decidedly more recreational, like Beertokens and Weeds. And while the name Mt. Gox instills a sense that physical Bitcoins just might be kept in some difficult-to-reach hollowed-out mountain vault, let’s remember that Mt. Gox stands for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange—that’s right, it was a trading-card exchange.

While you ponder that thousands of people had thousands of dollars tied up in an exchange that could just have easily started as a Pokémon swap site, here are a few cryptocurrencies aside from Bitcoin still extant. We’ve rounded up some that are named after hefty millionaires, beloved Libertarians, and Shiba Inus. So get out your mining gear and go through the gallery.